AI Alone Won’t Save Data Quality: Lessons from the Financial Markets

Tyler J. Brough

2025-03-18

Who Am I?

Michael I. Jordan: Data Sciece G.O.A.T?


Data Science: A Human-Centered Engineering Discipline

  • In 2019, Jordan wrote a provactive article
  • Calls for reduced hype around human imitative AI
  • Focus instead on:
      1. Human augmentatitive systems
      1. Intelligent infrastructure

Two Pillars of Catallatics

Catallactics


Q: What kind of economics for a human-centered engineering discipline?


Between Two Nobels: Buchanan & Hayek

  • Catallactics: economics as a humane science
  • The science of exchange, to admit into the community, to turn an outsider into a friend
  • The evolution of institutions as attempts to cope with knowledge/coordination problems
  • Martin Buber’s I and Thou

Hayek on Catallatics

“The confusion which has been created by the ambiguity of the word economy is so serious that for our present purposes it seems necessary to confine its use strictly to the original meaning in which it describes a complex of deliberately co-ordinated actions serving a single scale of ends, and to adopt another term to describe the system of interrelated economics which constitute the market order.”

“The term ‘catallactics’ was derived from the Greek verb katallattein (or katallassein) which meant, significantly, not only ‘to exchange’ but also ‘to admit into the community’ and ‘to change from enemy into friend’. From it the adjective ‘catallatic’ has been derived to serve in the place of ‘economic’ to describe the kind of phenomena with which the science of catallatics deals.”

Buchanan (1964) on Catallatics

“Should I have my say, I should propose that we cease, forthwith, to talk about ‘economics’ or ‘political economy,’ although the latter is the much superior term. Were it possible to wipe the slate clean, I should recommend that we take up a wholly different term such as ‘catallactics,’ or ‘symbiotics.’

“The elementary and basic approach that I suggest places ‘the theory of markets’ and not the ‘theory of resource allocation’ at center stage. My plea is really for the adoption of a sophisticated ‘catallactics’ …”

Hayekian on Knowledge and Coordination Problems … (see F. A. Hayek 1937)

… And Their Institutional Solution (see F. A. Hayek 1945)

Buchanan (1965)

Lessons from Financial Markets (see Williams 1982)

Roll (1984) on Orange Juice and Weather

Programmatic Sampling


  • What are the knowledge problems?
  • What are the coordination problems?
  • Enshittification? No!
  • A humane data science requires proper exchange relationships
  • The commons is simply the wrong analogy
  • What we have is an incomplete set of contracts in a properly structured labor market

References


Buchanan, James M. 1964. What Should Economists Do? Southern Economic Journal 30 (3): 213–22.
———. 1965. An Economic Theory of Clubs.” Economica 32 (125): 1–14.
Hayek, F. A. 1945. The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–30.
Hayek, F.A. 1937. Economics and Knowledge.” Economica 4 (13): 33–54.
Roll, Richard. 1984. Orange Juice and Weather.” American Economic Review 74 (5): 861–80.
Williams, Jeffrey C. 1982. The Origin of Futures Markets.” Agricultural History 56 (1): 306–16.